The Army's future body armor could be made of 'spider silk' that's stronger than Kevlar

It turns out the bulletproof vest of the future won't be made from super-strong plastics, but from spider silk.

That's what the US Army is betting a ten-month contract on. On July 12, the Department of Defense announced that it gave Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, which bills itself as a "Spider Silk Technology Company," a potential $1 million contract to research and develop body armor made of the company's genetically modified spider silk, called "Dragon Silk."

The silk is ultra-resilient silk due to a composite of spider proteins, but because of the spiders' cannibalistic mating habits, it's hard to produce the material in mass quantities. So Kraig genetically inserted the proteins into silkworms, since their bodies are already suited to silk production.

Spider silk is known as a resilient material in the textiles industry. A study from Nature found that spider silk has extraordinary toughness, meaning it's hard to fracture by penetrative forces. One study observed that the Darwin's Bark Spider produces silks with a toughness ten times that of Kevlar.

"Dragon Silk scores very highly in tensile strength and elasticity, which makes it one of the toughest fibers known to man and the ideal material for many applications," Jon Rice, COO of the company, said in a statement.

Rice told Live Science that the lab got costs for its Dragon Silk down to $300 per kilogram (roughly $136 a pound), down from $30-40,000 a kilogram ($13,600-$18,000 a pound) — a number that's hard to verify because there aren't any spider silk weaves on the market.

The bottom line is this, though: the technology could be commercially viable soon enough, to the point where American tax dollars could reasonably pay for it.